Drupal Planet

It is already four months after Drupal 7 was released. We can wait no more, this is the Drupal 7 version of Alphorn, one of our popular free Drupal themes.

Alphorn is the first free Drupal theme that Symphony introduced 1.5 years ago. It is quite popular among Drupal community. We had many requests for the Drupal 7 theme version of Alphorn but it could not be released right after Drupal 7 was released. It is because we have to wait for some essential modules such as Skinr and Fusion.

Our desire is to build an out-of-the-box Drupal install profile with Drupal 7 core, modules, sample content and Alphorn theme. Four months of waiting, many modules are still in development and unstable. We lost patience and decided to build a theme only package first. Now it is time to...

I am in the Drupal market for almost 3 years. At the end of each year, I have to conduct a business review to set strategies for the coming year. One of the most important criteria to be reviewed is the market trend. I am always looking for a growth of Drupal and how it compares to other open source CMSs. This year, I decide to make a 3 year review of Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress from 2008 to 2010. This review does not mean to be a professional market analysis report, it is only my personal observations

Background

I am used to read the Open Source CMS Market share report from Water & Stone at the end of each year, starting from 2008. In 2010, when I had the report, I got an idea to compare 3 reports to exact valuable information about Drupal and other open sources.

The big 3 of the market is Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. Almost of my customers demands from those three. My focus is Drupal, and I want to see after 3 years, where Drupal goes, where the other two have come up with. After comparing all figures, I saw only a small amount of information that were consistent over the years and I could extract some valuable information. I also searched for more information in Google about trends of those 3 CMSs.

Here are what I found.

Google Trend...

On Jan 5th 2011, the Drupal community all over the world celebrates the release of Drupal 7. We all expect that its features are significantly improved. But the greatest enhancement, in my opinion, is the User Experiences. As a theme developer, I was longing for this event, because it can bring Drupal closer to more people. Hopefully, I will write an entry for my experiences with the new Drupal soon enough.

Anw, this is my Vietnamese translation of the Press release (which has been published here)

Drupal ImageCache is a powerful Drupal module that helps you resize and crop images. You can use ImageCache with uploaded images, user profile pictures and a content type with CCK and ImageField. This article is to show you how to use ImageCache in Drupal.

Why using ImageCache? Obviously, to make your website look good. Suppose I create a view for a list of my blog entries. I will need all thumbnail images of those entries to have the same size, or at least the same width, so my blog does not look messy. To set the same format for those thumbnails, I use the Drupal ImageCache module.

Create a preset for images

The first step is to create a preset. When you want different formats for different content, for example, thumbnails images and user profile pictures, you need to create different presets.

Go to Administer -> Site Building -> Image cache.

Label a new namespace preset: for example "blog" and click on the 'Create preset' button.

Using terms in menus

Sometimes you want your navigation menu to display terms that you have created. Like this Symphony website, I created a term called "Theme", because this is a Drupal theme website. So I need to put this term to my main menu.

The menus on your site can call for items that match specific taxonomy terms, ie, terms you've named your categories. When you create a new term, Drupal assigns it a number. To see your term's number, hover over your term's name in the list terms. You'll see the number.

To create a taxonomy menu item

On the menus page, select add item, and fill taxonomy/term/1 in the path field.

If the term "sonatas" is term 1, this would call for all the nodes of that category....